Guillory didn’t return a call or message. He gave eight reasons for the recall, seven on a document and one on his Facebook page.

• “Our City Council has chosen $1.5 million dollars in salaries for the Office of the Mayor, while cutting the Youth Employment Opportunity Program funding by almost 50%,” he wrote on Facebook. “I will start gathering signatures to recall two Councilmen tomorrow!”

That statement is full of falsehoods.

The Council did not approve new mayoral staff positions. Voters did. With 57.77 percent of votes cast they handily approved Measure O in 2016.

Compensation for the four Mayor’s Office staff positions (including the mayor), benefits and all, totals $489,844. Even throwing in insurance, travel and paper clips brings the total only to $511,567.

One of those staff position should not even be counted as an increase; it is the position formerly occupied by previous Mayor Anthony Silva’s aide. Silva requested the new positions, by the way.

In any event, the sums are too small to justify a recall. The two new mayoral staff positions cost $294,123 or 0.135 percent of the $217 million fiscal 2017-18 General Fund budget.

As for the summer youth jobs, the city contributed $100,000 to a county summer jobs program for the past three years — at Tubbs’ urging. In the middle year, Tubbs noticed $100,000 of unspent, one-time money in one city department’s budget. The city chipped that in, too. To call the following year a “reduction,” while technically correct, ignores that the city’s base amount is $100,000, and that the contribution was Tubbs’ idea to begin with.

The other seven complaints are equally dubious.

• The Council members did not win their districts. They finished second in district primaries. But they were voted into office in the city-wide general election, thwarting the will of district voters.

It is an article of faith among some less-affluent and minority voters, and their advocates, that Stockton’s current voting system allows the citywide “dominant culture” to veto minority choices.

But the right to disagree with that view included the right to vote for the current system, which a majority of voters did democratically in 1986, minorities included.

Did the system usher in an era of Jim Crow? Between 1986 and 2014, 40 of 46 City Council candidates who won their district primaries went on to win in the city-wide vote.

One of the two candidates to whom Guillory alludes, who won his district but lost citywide, is District 6 candidate Sam Fant. Fant lost because he was indicted on voter fraud charges.

The city has changed to all-district voting in future elections anyway.

• Trouble with the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Wright has no record of FPPC discipline I can find. Andrade incurred a $100 fine for filling out a form incorrectly (admittedly, the holidays hampered research).

Mayor Anthony Silva, on the other hand, was chronically late with campaign finance disclosure forms. The FPPC repeatedly fined Silva. No recall ensued.

• “Openly supporting the privatization of civil services.” I could not find anyone who knew what this means.

• Failure to support the nine businesses closed recently by the city over alleged long-running fire safety violations.

The closure of the Empire Theatre building complex was an administrative decision by city staff and not a decision of the Council’s.

• Fiscal imprudence. This is simply false. The Council has showed fiscal discipline and stayed within the city’s tight, long-range budget.

• “No measurable impact on the Council.” If that’s true, the proper recourse is to vote the bums out in 2018.

• Guillory also alluded to one Council member switching party affiliation but accepting donations from his old base. I ran out of time to research this weird complaint.

Tubbs was disgusted.

“It seems very odd that we went through four years of chaotic leadership — with criminal charges — and there’s no talk of a recall," he said. "But when Stockton is finally moving forward we have the same small group of folks who like to disrupt Council meetings and call good bad. It’s a huge distraction.”

The stated reasons for this recall are false or wildly trumped-up. Just another example of critics who believe they deserve an outsized role in civic affairs though, mysteriously, very few voters agree.

— Contact columnist Michael Fitzgerald at (209) 546-8270 or michaelf@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/fitzgeraldblog and on Twitter @Stocktonopolis.

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